CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE STUDY OF BODY CONDITION OF DAIRY COWS IN RELATION WITH THEIR PHYSIOLOGICAL STATE

E.C. Popescu, I. Gîlcă, V. Maciuc, V. Ujică, Tr.Şt. Atanasiu, C. Cristian, Ancuţa Elena Coşuleanu

Abstract
In the countries with developed livestock, cows' body condition is an important indicator for comfort, maintenance and health assessing. Body energy reserves management for dairy cows improved production efficiency by reducing the incidence and severity of metabolic and reproductive diseases. In the current paper we study the physiologic phases of dairy cows during calving interval and we appreciated body condition. The biological material analyzed is from a top dairy cow farm, SC Panifcom SRL Vlădeni, from North-East area of Romania. After appreciation of animals' body condition using United States system with 5 points and with 0.25 graduation data were centralized and processed by calculating the main statistical indicators and frequency for of body condition in different physiological phases for the studied animals. The largest percent (23.71%) of cows which are in the phase of late part of gestation up to first month after calving had a body condition score of 3.75, for cows in service period phase up to first pregnancy month, body condition score was 2.75 for 27.6% of the animals. The highest rate of animals which are between 4 and 7 months of gestation were the value of 2.75 and for the majority of animals being in the late lactation phases (23.97%) the body condition score was 3.75.

Key words: body condition, dairy cows, physiologic status